


who's gonna walk you through the dark side of the morning?

by lazyfish



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst, Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Spoilers, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-29
Updated: 2018-04-29
Packaged: 2019-04-29 21:11:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14481264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lazyfish/pseuds/lazyfish
Summary: Contains spoilers for Infinity War!





	who's gonna walk you through the dark side of the morning?

**Author's Note:**

> In case you didn't see, this contains MAJOR Infinity War spoilers! Read at your own risk.

It was already dark outside when Hunter and Bobbi arrive in the safehouse, Robin wrapped around Hunter like the little monkey that she was. They had left the States the moment that thing had appeared in the sky over New York and had been bouncing from safehouse to safehouse across Europe, unsure what the hell was happening or how safe Robin was. They hadn’t heard anything from Coulson or his team, so they were operating under the assumption that they were possibly in danger, but not the imminent kind.

What else was new?

The safehouse, like most of them, only had one bedroom. Hunter carried Robin to the bed, setting her down as gently as possible. Despite his care, Robin stirred a little.

“I don’t feel good,” she said. Hunter frowned, settling the back of his hand against her forehead. She didn’t feel warm, but it also wasn’t like Robin to complain; most of the time she wasn’t in the present fully enough to alert him and Bobbi even if she wasn’t well. 

Hunter was halfway to responding to Robin when the little hand that had been clutching at his shirt began… disappearing. The hand looked like it was dissolving, or maybe decomposing – turning into leaf litter that was blown away despite there being not a single breeze stirring the air in the room.

Hunter watched in a mixture of shock and horror as the decomposition spread, whisking away Robin’s arm, her shoulders, her torso…

The little girl smiled as the contagion consumed her neck and began crawling up the side of her face. It should have been disturbing, but she just looked… at peace. “The future is changing,” Robin whispered. Then she was gone, not even the remnants of her body left to attest to her having been there in the first place.

“Bobbi!?” Hunter called, panicked. Bobbi appeared in the doorway, frowning.

“Hunter, what –”

“She disappeared,” he answered before Bobbi could ask the question. “I don’t know what happened, she just –”

“Oh,” Bobbi said before the words were all the way out. Hunter frowned. Why wasn’t she more concerned? Their ward had just –

Bobbi held up her hand, and it was turning to dust, too, albeit at a slower pace than Robin had.

“Bobbi, no, you can’t –” _You can’t go. You can’t leave me. You can’t disappear._

“Hush,” she murmured, moving forward to press the fingers of her still-intact hand against his lips. When Hunter looked into her eyes, he saw nothing – they were like the glass-smooth surface of an undisturbed lake, so calm and so, so blue. 

It was like she had prepared for this moment, and Hunter wondered which was worse; the idea that she was dissolving in front of his eyes, or that she seemed to have a plan of what to say.

“You can do this,” Bobbi told him firmly as her forearm vanished, and then her elbow. “You can do this, Lance.” 

No, no, that wasn’t what she was supposed to say – she was supposed to tell him that she was going to stay, that he wouldn’t have to be on his own. She couldn’t leave him, not again. Not this way. “I can’t.” His breath caught in his throat and Hunter let the sob unstick itself as he clutched for a shoulder that wasn’t there anymore.

“I love you.” Her leg was disappearing, too, and there were no longer fingers on Hunter’s lips. It hard started slowly but it was devouring her quicker and quicker. Whatever was destroying her was insistent, and hungry.

“No, Bobbi, please –” He tried again. 

Hellbeast that she was, she couldn’t let him finish more than one sentence. “Don’t die out there, okay?”

Fuck, fuck, fuck, he had to say something, fuck, fuck, fuck –

Bobbi was gone. And he hadn’t said anything. 

_Fuck._

Hunter spent the next five minutes looking at his own hand, wondering if he was going to be consumed, too. He half wished that he would be, because then the empty hole in his heart would just being turning itself inside out. He was… not numb, because numb implied a chance that he would feel again. He would not. 

He didn’t know what was happening; if this was something to do with the thing in the sky above New York or if it was something unrelated. The safehouse didn’t have cable, didn’t have WiFi, barely had cell reception –

Wait. Cell reception.

The panic phone, as they called it – as Bobbi had called it ( _no no can’t think about bobbi don’t think about bobbi please stop_ ) – had always been at the bottom of the duffel bag, untouched. They had promised that they weren’t going to touch the phone unless it was a matter of life or death, but…

But Bobbi was dead? It felt like it deserved a question mark, because she hadn’t died, her heart hadn’t stopped beating – she had just ceased to exist, almost like she had never been there at all.

Lance pressed his fingers against a scar along the underside of his fifth rib, where Bobbi had knifed him once. It was soft and puckered at the edges, and it was proof that Bobbi had existed. That she had been there, that she had hated him. He didn’t need proof that she had loved him. 

Did he?

Lance fished the burner phone out and stared at it for a long moment. Did he really want to do this? 

No, he didn’t. But he also desperately did not want to be alone in the place where Bobbi had died.

The one number in the phone was Coulson’s. It rang for what felt like forever, and Hunter ran through just about every scenario in his head. What if Coulson was gone too? And Mack, and Fitz, and Simmons, and Daisy, and –

“Who is this? Why do you have this number?” May’s voice was sharp, edged with more iron than usual. Someone was gone.

“Mockingbird is down,” Hunter answered with surprising clarity. He felt the words bounce around in chest for a long time, echoing in the space where his heart should have been. He didn’t have a heartbeat – even when he listened for the thudding of blood in his ears, Hunter couldn’t find it. The only conclusion was that he didn’t have a heart. It had dissolved when Bobbi did. “Requesting rendezvous and extraction.”

“And Robin?” May asked, ignoring his request. 

“Gone,” he answered. There was a puff of air across the line that could have been a sigh, or maybe a sob. When was he going to cry? Probably never, Hunter thought. He didn’t cry often. Or at all.

“I’ll send coordinates to this number. Prepare for pickup at 0700,” May said crisply. 

“Copy.” The line went dead.

There wasn’t any alcohol in the safehouse. Hunter spent the time sorting through his possessions, instead. Whatever he didn’t need immediately, he could leave at the house for pickup.

That was a bad idea.

At six in the morning, Hunter sat on the roof of the safehouse, clutching Bobbi’s sweatshirt against his chest. He watched the sun rise over a dead world, where the one person who had really mattered was _gone_.

He was going to kill the bastard who did this.

(Later, May would tell him that he would have to wait in line, but that did not stop Hunter from putting a bullet through Thanos’s eye socket.)

**Author's Note:**

> guys. guys. i just got back from seeing infinity war and i am literally _deceased_. i am a corpse who is writing this. please someone come cry with me.


End file.
